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The requirement imposed upon untenured ‘early career’ scholars to target only alleged “quality” publications is academic narrowcasting. Zines fall between the cracks of experiment and necessity. Over time necessity produces conformity. A conformity encouraged by pressures of dubious provenance, a consequence of the new privatisation championed by parasite aggregator companies like Elsevier, academia.edu and Taylor and Francis that prefer not to employ many people (as is the way of platform capitalism) and so engineer elite sector data compliance through simplification and regularity of product – electronic proletarianisation, insofar as this enables algorithmic automation (full luxury uniformity, replicant writing and dalek alliegences)….

The government will also establish separate agencies to better [kill] co-ordinate [maim] and promote [murder through] industry exports [and a mass shadow generator of Turnbull’s own twisted design].

‘Price of liberty’

[unable to contain the hypocrisy] Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne said prospective buyers would face stringent checks to ensure “[we] don’t get into markets where we don’t want to be” [from the deck of his personal Eclipse Class dreadnought].

Critics said Australia should not deepen its [pockets through yet more corrupt] investment in defence exports.

[in the first somewhat sane voice of the day, we heard on Millennium Falcon radio that] “We should not be getting into the game of marketing weapons which kill, maim, and bring great sorrow and destruction to communities around the world,” Marc Purcell, chief executive of Australian Council for International Development, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

However, Mr Turnbull said nations could not forgo defence spending because the “price of liberty is eternal vigilance” [and other howlers from the cliche songbook of the dark arts, blood money, rogue crazy book of sell your own mother for a poll boost playbook]

“So that is why every nation, responsible nation, including our own, sets out to have the capabilities to defend itself, whatever and however circumstances may develop in the future,” he said [while onlookers gasped at the opportunism, and some choked on the smell of sulphur]

The US is the world’s largest arms exporter, making up a third of all sales, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. [ugh, I cannot even say what it took to get this far. still more smoke, we are not on Dalari Prime anymore, last ticket to Baskerville sells in 4 hours]

The next biggest exporters are Russia, China, France and Germany and the UK [amidst the strange stench a patriotic thought squeezes through the asphyxiation of my last remaining brain cells as the cryo chamber fires up – and I think that really, its the world cup that matters, who is in the play-offs, and did they have the right kind of ball skills? Yes, I watch the football, it distracts me from any recognition that typed cynicism is never going to step up to the level required to defeat these bastards. The possibility that humour might somehow keep alive the slim chance that all this could be wiped away in an angry uprising – canberra in ruins, the national gallery turned into a hospice, Kara Thrace as Joan of a new Ark – is, frankly, not sufficient, but then I stupidly turned on the BBC news channel. Like a fool. All I’ve left is these three tellurian credits. Burn it to the ground, incarnadine …

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Our colleagues in Turkey are facing incredible repression under a populist leader. This is part of a wider, global trend where academic and speech freedoms have increasingly been stifled due to neoliberalism and authoritarianism. I hope you can spread this call below widely and show your solidarity by following and publicizing peace academics’ court hearings that are scheduled to begin soon. Kind regards.
Call for solidarity for the academics for peace on trial

Violations of academic freedom and freedom of speech in Turkey have reached a dire situation. The intimidations from Turkish government and its affiliates toward academics have escalated to legal action, whereby peace signatory academics face 7.5 years’ imprisonment if convicted for “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.”

In January 2016, 1128 academics signed the Peace Petition, titled ‘We Will Not Be A Party To This Crime’ in order to draw the public’s attention to the brutal acts of violence perpetrated by the state in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Immediately after the release of the petition, many signatories were prosecuted, dismissed from their posts, and their citizenship rights were seized. A large number of academics including Nobel Prize laureates and members of major science academies around the world initiated a support campaign nationally and internationally. People from different professions, such as journalists, artists, screen actors and actresses, and writers voiced their support for the persecuted academics. More people signed the petition, yet the suppression on the signatory academics got fiercer; hundreds of more academics were dismissed with statutory decrees, their passports were confiscated, they were banned from public sector employment, and criminal investigations were launched. Many of those academics had to leave the country and are now facing extreme difficulties in resettling their lives and professions. One of the signatory academics –Mehmet Fatih Traş– could not stand this injustice and committed suicide. The declaration of state of emergency in July 2016 after a military coup attempt further blurred the distinction between criminal investigations and political punishment, and opened an arduous and painful avenue for not only the academics but also for journalists, writers, teachers, artists and others who demand freedom of speech in Turkey.

The signatory academics abroad have recently initiated a targeted boycott towards the Turkish higher education system, and its complicit universities. The aim of the academic boycott is to ensure that all dismissals are revoked and the persecution of academics, exacerbated under the state of emergency regime, is ended. To this boycott, and continuous struggle of Academics for Peace, the government recently responded by a harsher strategy: signatory academics are sued on an individual basis based on the accusation of terror propaganda according to the Law on Struggle against Terrorism, Article 7/2. The public prosecutor proposes imprisonment extending to 7.5 years. The number of academics with indictments is increasing day by day, and their trials start on December 5, 2017.

Since the petition, one of the most important acts of support for the academics who demanded peace has been the solidarity from colleagues who are not content with Turkey’s oppressive regime and its fatal actions on freedom of speech. In this new turn, we are well aware that we will need a stronger voice of resistance and call for justice! This solidarity can be through standing by us in the court hearings starting December 5, 2017, sending monitoring teams, observers, and news-makers; spreading the word and raising the awareness for what is happening now in Turkey regarding the academics.

In order to stand in solidarity with the persecuted academics, we, the peace academics from North America, call on you to:

Urban beauty. I dunno if I am more disgusted by this event with Ivanka or the WP’ article’s failure to do proper comparative memory work – since I do remember various round-ups for dignitary visits in Australia. Malcolm Fraser, bizzaro now a lefty icon, had Alice Springs cleaned up for a visit of Commonwealth Heads. And then the area around Sydney was to be cleaned up before the Olympics as I remember. Tom Forgan, head evangelist for the Advanced technology Park, said: ‘well, you don’t want all your poor people standing around in the middle of the city do you’. Oh, and who was being cleaned up? Not poor white folks, of course. Bleaaagrrrrr:

Ivanka Trump’s impending visit to India prompts roundup of beggars

NEW DELHI — As Ivanka Trump’s visit to India nears, the south Indian city of Hyderabad is getting ready to dazzle its foreign guests — by locking its homeless and destitute people out of sight in prison rehabilitation centers.

Nearly 400 beggars were picked up from city streets and trucked away to one such center at the Chanchalguda jail, the Indian Express reported.

As the city scrubs up to impress its foreign guests, police plan to clear away 6,000 beggars and have banned begging entirely in the city until the first week of January.

The beggars are “employing children and handicapped persons to seek alms at the main junctions of roads,” said the ban order. “Such acts are causing annoyance and awkwardness.”

“Some beggars argued that we were taking their freedom to live anywhere they want but we told them it was for their own good because they are going to the rehab centre where they will be taken care of,” an unnamed official told the Express.

The beggar clearance comes weeks ahead of the three-day Global Entrepreneurship Summit that starts Nov. 28, where the first daughter will lead the American delegation to co-host the summit.

Ivanka Trump delivers a speech at the World Assembly for Women in Tokyo on Nov. 3. (Eugene Hoshiko/AFP/Getty Images)

Authorities told ABC News that they want Trump and foreign delegates to see India’s good side and not the “Slumdog Millionaire” stereotype commonly associated with the country.

The event’s theme is “Women First” and its tagline, “Prosperity for All.”

In the past few decades, Hyderabad has rapidly rebranded itself as India’s Silicon Valley, as an outsourcing hub for global firms and the Indian headquarters of international tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. But despite rapid growth, wealth is unevenly distributed and a huge homeless population lives off the scraps of the city’s techie middle class.

In recent years, the city’s fortunes have begun to turn for the worse. Automation threatens jobs and new visa restrictions in multiple countries, including changes to H-1B in the United States, have dampened the hopes and ambitions of many young technology students.

To bring back some of its sparkle, India’s government is keen to portray the country as a pioneering technology hub and attract foreign investment.

George Rakesh Babu, founder of the homeless charity Good Samaritans in Hyderabad, said, “The preparations are happening in every corner of our city. But the prison capacity in Hyderabad is not enough to look after all these people.” He pointed out that the central jail’s maximum capacity was only 1,000.

Vanishing acts like this are not unprecedented when foreign dignitaries come to India. They happened in Hyderabad in 2000 when President Bill Clinton visited the city.

To judge from some of the reaction on the police department’s Twitter account, the move was welcomed by many.

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I dunno where else to dump this, which will now not be used in a review I was writing on regional film traditions:

Yet here is a topic ripe for serious comparative consideration if one, as necessity needs must, thinks across to the USA where a movie star became president, another became state governor – and only missed his ultimate ‘I’ll be back’ moment of becoming president because he was ineligibly born in Europe. Presently a real estate mogul is republican frontrunner on a virulently crazy platform of thinking Jesus wants him for a sunbeam (hat-tip Gore Vidal), his finger itching to blow immigrants, Moslems, Mexicans, Ruskies and whoever else to kingdom come. Reagan was a comic actor after all, Schwarzenegger a muscleman, or mechanical robot – his nuanced performance as a machine is itself interestingly dialectical. There are, nevertheless, distinct kinds of heroes in the social films – the robin hood character, the working class hero, the prince among fools – such that affection can build upon identification of repeated performance in such roles. Reagan did not benefit from the monkey movies perhaps, but the muscle man for California makes a certain Sky-net sci-fi sense.

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Referring to industrial pollution as the anthropocene lets the polluters off the hook. It has gone on some time now, so as the word isn’t going away its high time to ask just who is the anthro in this anthrobscenity? The generality is clear, but maybe it would be worth considering a few things that should be more obvious; that the ruling classes of the capitalist world system profit from polluting and have done so all along; collective control of the machinery of production would imply collective responsibility and collective decisions about how we all live; blame for the anthropocene glossed as blame on humans as such of course obscures entrenched privileges and hierarchies of class, region and nation, and history; capitalism is not the only global option, nor even the first ‘world system’, but it’s disconnect of responsibility and control of the means of reproduction is unique and appalling; reproduction of life need not pollute, need not harm, need not waste lives or energies – you do not have to fuck people over to survive; the Eurocentrism of the formulations here – anthropocene century climate change and scarcity discourses is blatant but underexamined; recycling tokens, reform targets or regulatory mechanisms mean little change while wealth determines power via control of the means of production; exclusivist opportunist private control turns means of production into means of pollution every time; Anthropocene means nothing more than a few of the usual suspect fuckers fucking the planet and getting away with it, with obfuscation – it’s really fucked up, fuckity fuck your filthy polluting class privilege, oil slick dodges, legitimacy excuses, the obscenity of your scams and all your dirty anthro-words.

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– part of a gripes version of a future essay/chapter/book that will be rehearsed online here or on academia.edu